Intro and Overview

This project introduces a new family of consensus protocols. The founders were inspired by gossip algorithms, this new family gains its safety through a deliberately metastable mechanism. The network randomly chooses the group of nodes and steers them towards the same outcome. Analysis shows that metastability can move a large network to an irreversible state quickly, though it is not always guaranteed to do so.

The project is still in stealth mode and has very little information revealed.

Product description

Technology

Avalanche project whitepaper describes 4 protocols that will form a protocol family: Slush, Snowflake, Snowball, Avalanche. This protocol family will use Byzantine adversaries and provide high throughput and scalability, which means higher TPS and more users. Avalanche “generalizes Snowball and maintains a dynamic append-only Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of all known transactions. The DAG has a single sink that is the genesis vertex”.

According to the founder’s posts in their Telegram chat group, Avalanche team is also considering sharding: “The DAG structure provides a natural way to partition the work, so Ava lends itself naturally to sharding”.

Avalanche protocol family will offer:

Higher TPS: 1,000 to 10,000

Quick finality and low latency

Quiescent protocol – the protocol will be sustainable and not energy consuming.

Market and competitors

Overview

Despite the fact that the protocol Avalanche is recognized by critics as an extremely interesting one, the project at this stage of its development is a dark horse, of which very little is known.

Its direct competitor, Perlin, has already received high reviews from various critics, including ICOBazaar team. Avalanche team in their Telegram chat group often criticise Perlin project, saying that Perlin is a project looking for hype and money that not completely understands the Avalanche consensus. “Avalanche is the main effort based on Avalanche. It has a coin design that takes advantage of the unique properties of the underlying consensus mechanism”, says the founder Emin Gün Sirer.

We have wrote in our Perlin ICO Review that Perlin is a decentralized cloud computing network, where users will be able to rent out computing resources (smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.) to provide cheap and efficient compute power. The project is also using Avalanche consensus and achieved 1,300 TPS speed at <5 seconds latency during tests. The Perlin project is moving faster and already has partners and an obvious advantage in the market that plays against Avalanche project.

Delivery

Roadmap

There is no road map published

Team and advisory board

There’s only information about the founder of the project Emin Gün Sirer, who is a computer scientist and currently an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, co-director of IC3 and also former employee at AT&T Bell Labs on Plan 9, at DEC SRC, and at NEC. He developed the SPIN (operating system), worked on the Nexus OS and created Karma system, the first cryptocurrency that uses a distributed mint based on proof-of-work. He is also a actively engages in science and publishes articles in respected computer science journals.

Token distribution and token sale details

Total Token Offered

TBA

Private sale Date

TBA

Public Tokensale Date

TBA

In their Telegram channel the team regularly answers that ICO will be held, but dates are not set yet.

Hype

Website review

Avalanchelabs web page doesn’t have any information except “Coming soon” button and Whitepaper link. It also doesn’t have enough traffic for Similarweb to show their results, according to Whois service, the domain name was registered in July 2018 and updated in August 2018 by US IP address. For now, traffic is mostly direct (73%) and referrals (26%).

(Source: SimilarWeb.com)

Media and community

Their social media activity is low, they have 2 social media sources: Telegram page has 13,947 members and the founder’s Twitter with 71,100 followers.

There is no articles in media about the project

Conclusions and editorial opinion

Risks and Potential

Advantages

New family of consensus protocols that combines the best features of classical (Lamport-Liskov) consensus and Nakamoto consensus:

Quick finality, low latency (~2sec)

High throughput (1000-10000 tps)

Scales (10k-10m nodes)

Robust, no need for precise membership

Quiescent, green, sustainable

Inspired by epidemic protocols and gossip networks

Security guarantees controlled by the system designer

Easy to understand the basis for security

New idea: deliberately metastable

The fact that the project has a strong leader Emin Gün Sirer with relevant and impressive background allows to expect that the team behind the project really knows what it is doing.

Disadvantages

No team info available

No roadmap

Whitepaper doesn’t cover every eventuality and refers to a specific set of circumstances

No mvp

Investment prospects

It is too little information about the project, its’ team and their goals, however the technology is new and very promising. They have a very strong competitor Perlin that already has good reviews and lots of Github code samples.

Having Emin Gün Sirer as a founder gives Avalanche ICO a reason to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, while the information on the team is not made public, it is too early to make any estimates based on the founder alone.

The Avalanche consensus is definitely a big thing and blockchain community is really into it right now, but the main question is who will be able to attract more users. At this stage, the project Avalanche will have to do a huge amount of work including purely marketing tasks like publishing team info, developing web page and revealing more information.

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